Sex And Porn

Trending News: Men Who Watch A Lot Of Porn Enjoy Sex Less

Why Is This Important?

You might be deep-sixing your own sex life.

Long Story Short

The endless debate around how watching porn affects your sex life continues. The newest study finds that porn influences real-life sex for men, as those who watch it frequently need it to stay aroused.

Long Story

While it may or may not be agreed upon that watching porn helps us get in the mood for sex, concerns around its affect on real-life sexual experiences abound. That porn has become by default the sex education of today and that people's sexual expectations are founded by watching on-screen (read: not real) entertainment, makes it harder for porn-watchers to enjoy sex in real life, with real people.

The latest study on the matter was published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior. It repeated what psychologists have been worrying about for years: Porn influences real-life relationships. According to the report, men who watch porn frequently need it to stay aroused, relying on it instead of real-life sexual experiences.

The study came out of the University of Arkansas, where an associate professor of psychology Ana Bridges and her colleagues studied 487 male college students. They found that how often men watched porn correlated directly with how much they wanted to act out scenes they'd seen. The more they watched, the more they relied on pornographic fantasies in the bedroom as well.

The good news is that the study specifies watching porn "frequently as "several days a week or more" so chances are if you're watching a smaller dose — and if you work 40 hours a week and have a social life, that's probably you — you won't actually be enjoying real-life sex any less. But porn watching afficcionados should take note: Don't expect your real-life experiences to mimic what you see in porn — that really could ruin your sex life.

Own The Conversation

Ask The Big Question: If watching too much porn means you actually need it to stay aroused, what kinds of crazy expectations do porn stars have when having sex in real life?

Disrupt Your Feed: Several recent studies have found that teenagers around the world report using porn to gain information about real life sex.

Drop This Fact: It's not breasts that send men over the edge — the body part that we focus on when watching porn is actually the woman's face. According to "badonkadonk," an eye-tracking study from the Kinsey Institute at the University of Indiana, eyes and lips win out over breasts.